The phone rang. It was Shawn. Did I want to watch a movie? I said I did, and a few minutes later I heard a loud rumble and looked out the window. With his booming black motorcycle and his wide-brimmed Aussie hat, he seemed entirely out of place parking parallel to Grandma’s white picket fence. Grandma started making brownies, and Shawn and I went upstairs to choose a movie.
We paused the movie when Grandma delivered the brownies. We ate them in silence, our spoons clicking loudly against Grandma’s porcelain plates. “You’ll get your twenty-seven,” Shawn said suddenly when we’d finished.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll go either way. What if Dad’s right? What if I get brainwashed?”
Shawn shrugged. “You’re as smart as Dad. If Dad’s right, you’ll know when you get there.”
The movie ended. We told Grandma good night. It was a balmy summer evening, perfect for the motorcycle, and Shawn said I should ride home with him, we’d get the car tomorrow. He revved the engine, waiting for me to climb on. I took a step toward him, then remembered the math book on Grandma’s table.
“You go,” I said. “I’ll be right behind you.”
Shawn yanked his hat down on his head, spun the bike around and charged down the empty street.
I drove in a happy stupor. The night was black—that thick darkness that belongs only in backcountry, where the houses are few and the streetlights fewer, where starlight goes unchallenged. I navigated the winding highway as I’d done numberless times before, racing down the Bear River Hill, coasting through the flat stretch parallel to Fivemile Creek. Up ahead the road climbed and bent to the right. I knew the curve was there without looking for it, and wondered at the still headlights I saw shining in the blackness.
I began the ascent. There was a pasture to my left, a ditch to my right. As the incline began in earnest I saw three cars pulled off near the ditch. The doors were open, the cab lights on. Seven or eight people huddled around something on the gravel. I changed lanes to drive around them, but stopped when I saw a small object lying in the middle of the highway.
It was a wide-brimmed Aussie hat.
I pulled over and ran toward the people clustered by the ditch. “Shawn!” I shouted.
The crowd parted to let me through. Shawn was facedown on the gravel, lying in a pool of blood that looked pink in the glare from the headlights. He wasn’t moving. “He hit a cow coming around the corner,” a man said. “It’s so dark tonight, he didn’t even see it. We’ve called an ambulance. We don’t dare move him.”
Shawn’s body was contorted, his back twisted. I had no idea how long an ambulance might take, and there was so much blood. I decided to stop the bleeding. I dug my hands under his shoulder and heaved but I couldn’t lift him. I looked up at the crowd and recognized a face. Dwain.* He was one of us. Mother had midwifed four of his eight children.
“Dwain! Help me turn him.”
Dwain hefted Shawn onto his back. For a second that contained an hour, I stared at my brother, watching the blood trickle out of his temple and down his right cheek, pouring over his ear and onto his white T-shirt. His eyes were closed, his mouth open. The blood was oozing from a hole the size of a golf ball in his forehead. It looked as though his temple had been dragged on the asphalt, scraping away skin, then bone. I leaned close and peered inside the wound. Something soft and spongy glistened back at me. I slipped out of my jacket and pressed it to Shawn’s head.
When I touched the abrasion, Shawn released a long sigh and his eyes opened.
“Sidlister,” he mumbled. Then he seemed to lose consciousness.
My cellphone was in my pocket. I dialed. Dad answered.
I must have been frantic, sputtering. I said Shawn had crashed his bike, that he had a hole in his head.
“Slow down. What happened?”
I said it all a second time. “What should I do?”
“Bring him home,” Dad said. “Your mother will deal with it.”
I opened my mouth but no words came out. Finally, I said, “I’m not joking. His brain, I can see it!”
“Bring him home,” Dad said. “Your mother can handle it.” Then: the dull drone of a dial tone. He’d hung up.
Dwain had overheard. “I live just through this field,” he